I blinked awake. As I left that dream an uncertain kind of heavy feeling fell upon me.

The television was repeating the voices of the Japanese commentators, all one and the same: a digital creation designed to replace the phonetic human imperfections.

Ai had left the TV on, like every night. Five years together, four under the same roof and three since we married, but still some habits are impossible to change. The voice was announcing the visit to the smallest ramen restaurant in Fukuoka, a jewel that opened more than forty years ago. The people on TV exaggerated their reactions to any information. Ahs and ohs extended. Unbelievable, delicious. A red overlay text in the corner showed the date and time: August 31st, 2023, 1:38 am.

I looked towards Ai and confirmed there was no way she could wake up. As for me, waking up at all was like saying farewell to any possibility of going back to sleep. I started flipping channels until I landed on NHK and saw some very old black-and-white footage that was colored digitally, the rare visuals made me stop instinctively. It was a documentary for the hundredth anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake and that footage was something never seen before. A group of experts were explaining how severe the earthquake was and what made it worse. It turns out the people quickly abandoned their homes, taking everything they owned. The next day, many fires combined with a typhoon striking the Tokyo area created a fire tornado –something I’d never heard of before– that would cause the death of ninety thousand people, most of them stuck somewhere in the city with flammable stuff all around.

Each time footage from my area appeared on the screen, my eyes flew to the images, mesmerized. Asakusa, Sumida River, Ueno, Yoshiwara, even Arakawa. Those had been the most affected areas and were pointed out as the ones with the oldest buildings. All negative things back then, sure, but my pride rose with every image anyway. The documentary kept me entertained for an hour until the announcement of the second part appeared on the screen – tomorrow, on the anniversary’s exact date.

Out of bed, I poured myself a glass of orange juice. Last day of holidays. During the summer we couldn’t go back to Argentina due to Ai’s father, whose health had deteriorated and forced us to visit him in Toyama. He had cancer, diagnosed months ago, and it simply got worse. Nothing was set in stone yet, the visit had been just in case. We spent a week there and saved the rest of the holidays for later on. If there wasn’t any emergency, maybe we could make a trip to Argentina for Christmas. The only firsthand consequence had been that all those free days had ended up feeling the same.

The pandemic had already erased any excitement from my routine, especially the time I had for myself. Not having to go to the office was starting to weigh on me. The nomikai went from weekly to fantasy. The transition hadn’t been easy or straightforward, but ultimately Japanese: without much explaining and under the motto of everything is going well. From Ai’s point of view, it all worked out for the best. I was at home all the time and that made her happy. But I could barely work, or listen to music. I couldn’t recall when the last time I read a book was, a little habit that used to keep me company on the trains.

During the different states of emergency imposed by the Japanese government during 2020 and part of 2021, I got used to taking a walk when I couldn’t sleep. It was a way to have some time for myself without Ai taking offense. My absence allowed her to do whatever she did when I wasn’t around, things that didn’t really matter to me. Upon my return, I always noticed I was able to handle her presence with more grace and patience. I drank the last of the juice and went out into the night, that infamous Tokyo hour when the sky was so dark and full of lights it almost looked like a dead sun rising.

My walks always took me through the same streets and the same corners. I started on the avenue behind my house and went down Ryusen (the dragon’s fountain), a neighborhood where nothing ever happened and whose only claim to fame is a memorial to Higuchi Ichiyo, the writer on the five thousand yen bill. Museums, temples, and plaques carry her name. At least it was useful as a signal to cross up to Sanja: the land of drunk old men. There, urine and alcohol mixed in a painful scent. It looks like the neighborhood where I grew up, filled with shopping carts loaded with cans, homeless on most streets and us (the young ones) without an exit plan. Sanja is one of those areas in Tokyo that has barely changed through the years. I walked those empty streets at night feeling like the owner of the city, or a shareholder at least. I got lost in that investment. My path arced and almost went over itself. As that curve was ending, I reached the cat’s temple on Imado. I had the personal tradition of looking for the white cat from the temple and found it every time. That was also my cat, as much as it was my temple and my neighborhood. Later, I moved towards the middle-class side of Asakusa towards Senzoku-dori. Small shops selling things one could get cheaper online, but still had a place in modernity, unchanging like everything on those walks.

Next, I was to cross Shin-Yoshiwara on my way back. The red light district sustained the same income stream from ancient times, if updated slightly. At night, the marquees from the soaplands and love hotels illuminated the asphalt. A light summer rain had started to fall. Masculine voices blared out from the brothels, it was the same scene repeating on a loop. “Are you interested in any girl?” “Come in and have a drink, we’ve been waiting for you,” “You get a free drink if you buy one for one of our girls.” I turned to get away from the harassment. My paranoia was strong since I didn’t want any neighbors to recognise me. Traffic became non-existent after I turned right. I saw a silhouette out of the corner of my eye. I looked in that direction but couldn’t find it. In the air, some red shadow-like dust mixed with the raindrops. An unusual smell reached my nose instead. Wood. I tried to follow the scent, but a sound distracted me, two flat surfaces hitting against each other. Suddenly, thunder howled and rain came down harder. I couldn’t find shelter. Through the storm, I couldn’t see anything to lead me back to my usual path, zero references. I ran and turned, everything was strange and familiar, with no future in sight.

“You’re all wet now,” said a voice behind me. An old man with a few teeth and bushy eyebrows. Plain, dirty and unkempt, he was wearing a brown kimono and black hakama pants, with a poncho-like blanket over his shoulders. His face contorted in a cartoon-like expression.

“It’s because of the rain,” I explained, pointing to the sky.

“It was a fleeting one,” he said, fixing the blanket. “I hope it didn’t ruin a special evening.” I couldn’t understand what he meant. A long and dark dirt road extended ahead of us. The man laid his hand on my back and pushed me forward. “Summer nights with a gentle drizzle are the best. There are fewer people and most of the pretty girls are free,” he added. “You have to take a chance. Don’t let it get to you.” His face was crossed by lines, straight, curved, parallel, and perpendicular. A bald head without a single strand of hair and a nose shaped like a hook. Ironically, some hairs stood out from the rest, longer and whiter on his eyebrows. It looked as if all the vegetation had moved into a corner of the garden. Something in his look resembled a ukiyo-e painting, maybe an exaggeration in his features, maybe the passage of time highlighted in every angle.

The pillars of the gateway appeared far away but were easily noticeable for their golden color. They went up and closed in an arch. Shin-Yoshiwara-mon. It had nothing of the modern Tokyo lights, yet there was a glow to it. Magenta particles floated in the air, like ghostly clouds of the rain that drove me here.

“Do you have money?” a man asked us at the entrance. On his head was a bandana with the kanji for new in blue on a white background. My eyes stopped on his wooden sandals sinking in the mud. The kind on the man at the entrance. The kind on the man with the eyebrows. The kind everyone around was wearing. “Of course,” said Eyebrows and added something else that was impossible to comprehend. Then he gave him a coin. It looked like the ten yen coin but with a small difference: instead of Byōdō-in, the iconic temple in Kyoto, it had a sun almost identical to the old one peso coin from Argentina. The man with the bandana turned to me and said: “Please, continue ahead.”

At that moment I noticed Eyebrows’ Japanese sounded ancient but at the same time I didn’t need to make any effort to understand it. It didn’t make any sense but I wasn’t going to question it since it was equally strange how he understood my Japanese, modern and not native. Even if I were a native speaker, there was little chance of understanding each other. Japanese is such an evolutionary language half of them were probably new words, most of them adapted from English. Yet, it worked.

My eyes moved to the middle of the arch that joined the pillars, towards a small statue of a geisha looking north, maybe in search of her next client. The place was like a gated community, except that the houses were establishments of different kinds and the goal was to spend money. From each path and dark corner grotesque shapes hinted at themselves. An unnatural grunt, air filled with animal breath. It could be the consequence of pleasure, the anxiety, the hunger for what’s to come. In the middle of it, I could see an enormous sakura tree, only green leaves left in the summer. Thanks to the red-paper lanterns all around, it drew shadows on the floor but they didn’t resemble any part of a tree. On the right and left of the path, there were structures, like houses that instead of walls had movable panels of wooden bars.

Inside, a faint light shone over the geishas. In that sort of showcase, some danced, some played the shamisen. They fixed their clothes not so much as needed for the outfit, but as a way to capture the eyes of potential clients.  They could be haggling or getting to know each other – I didn’t know a thing about that dynamic. The girls hid behind the kimonos, a base of white make-up covering their skin and decorated with additional color. Eyes outlined in black giving it the traditional almond shape, lips extremely red, a dash of pink on the cheeks to convey some sense of blushing. And I can’t even describe those elaborate hairstyles. Round, held in some mysterious way I could only call magic with not a strand of hair out of place. Long and short pins with chains of flowers hanging, and yellow decorations that just looked like sticks to me. Behind bars, they could unleash all their charms, their art of seduction. The clients moved about those cages as if they knew where they were going. But not really. My only task was to watch, and I did. I saw all of those intense stares that could translate as lust and obsession. Empty expressions, as if they couldn’t find a cure to what possessed them.

Now and then a murmur would arise as a surprise, a pleasure, a sadness. Something in the air was intoxicating. It could be that vermillion smell getting to your brain through the nose. Invisible and overtaking. Nothing in that scene felt suggestive to my eyes. To me, erotism is strippers and those 21st-century women with minuscule outfits. Maybe it was that instilled habit of seeing a woman as an object and what she showed (or didn’t); here it was about their skills and abilities, the charm had to make you feel something, captivate you. It could also be that I didn’t get the point of it all, since I wasn’t an authority in any historical period.

Eyebrows quickly found a girl and settled in a corner close to her. He held himself with his arms stuck between the wooden bars. His body outside, his hands gesticulating intrusively. He looked like a man standing on a ledge, with every movement planned. His voice was strategically lower, forcing her to get closer and closer. I stood on the opposite side, with more of a general view of the scene. I had already looked into most of the cages, in search of the murmurs, the beauty. Some were more intense than others. Some more justified. But beauty exists in everything, it just depends on the eyes unearthing it. And mine itched and teared up a couple of times since my arrival, as if rejecting a fallen eyelash. In a way, I was trying to find some inspiration, something that would entertain me enough to continue that visit. Yes, I saw movements full of grace. Yes, the attraction came into play as soon as I greeted one of them. Yes, their eyes were heavy with indecency and promises of eternal passion. But nothing there had me attached to it.

Eyebrows appeared again behind my back. “Are you one of those who only likes to watch?” he said. “Don’t insult the girls, they are working”, he continued, his laughter roaring. He put his arm around me and dragged me by my shoulder.

“Where are we going?” I asked but he didn’t quite answer.

“The footwear,” he exclaimed. “You are wearing the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.” I looked at my simple canvas sneakers. His sandals clacking reminded me of the sound of crows cawing.

We went behind the bars and into a big room with people rushing quietly, the main sound was feet and utensils, fabrics sliding among the murmur of voices. We climbed up a staircase that looked more like a ladder, no handrails, no solid structure just wooden steps creaking. We popped up in the middle of a hallway, low walls, barely my height, separated the rooms. I followed Eyebrows to the third door and he slid it open.

“Welcome, Ji-chan,” was the greeting that repeated seven times, one for every girl in the room. The sequence happened so fast I barely caught it. We sat on pillows as the girls moved frantically to pour us nihonshu. All of them had a task – there was the one who started conversations, the one reacting to the answers, the one looking for any excuse to touch him and the one who laughed identically and regularly each time the situation merited it. They surrounded him right away. I assumed he was a regular and didn’t need much of an invitation, maybe this particular brothel was just a cheap one.

“My friend can manage by himself, he is the kind that likes to watch,” said Eyebrows. The girls laughed.

There was something clear: they knew he had money and I didn’t. The girls gathered around their Ji-chan going for the prize of being the chosen one to take his money, I guessed. In a sense, I could see a resemblance with the nomikai I had gone to in Japan. Back in the day, I would go out to drink with my coworkers. There, too, everyone has a role. The girls look for the attention of the single men, and I would settle for some collateral attention. Regardless of time, all of those are mating rituals, survival mechanisms. The girls around the table wore different kimonos, patterns with birds and fishes, covered with flowers, soft colors and geometric patterns. The hairstyles weren’t any simpler, the same impossible circular shape. One of the girls was topping up my glass and I noticed how long it had taken. Then I noticed more things, like the girl sitting in the middle was more quiet, but had a constant smile and her eyes set on Eyebrows. The rest showed a different quality in their look, the details in the hair. A sort of rank started to become apparent to me and the one who filled my cup up seemed to be far from the top, not sure if she was even on that rank. Nevertheless, all the girls shared the same attitude. “Ji-chan, don’t say those things.” “Ji-chan, don’t peek under my kimono.” “So funny.” “Do you have money for all of us?” He was getting played and loving it.

Between comment and comment Eyebrows went deeper in his drunkenness. Eventually, when it became impossible to understand a single word coming out of his mouth and he was losing his balance (even when sitting down), two girls stood up.

“Let’s go relax, Ji-chan.”

“…my friend,” Eyebrows mumbled while being taken away. They walked him to a corner of the room, behind a series of folding screens that they arranged. Once it was ready, the most distinguished of the girls stood up, bowed to the ones that remained at the table and got lost with them behind that barrier.

Most of the remaining girls left the same way we came in. The last one folded the coat Eyebrows had left behind and began cleaning the room. She stopped for a moment to pour me another drink. I had been studying her movements for a while, the way she piled things up on a tray, the short steps she took between one space and the other, and the way the fabric around her hips would tighten as she knelt in one swift movement.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Keiko,” she said with a smile. A meter sixty, her skin looked like a petal from a plum flower, an obvious softness mixed with delicate lines like brushstrokes. Black eyes, big ones. She quickly took some pins from her hair and it all fell loose, then she tied it back twisted on itself. She asked me, “Are you going to wait for your friend?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any money,” I added. A silence followed. I was enchanted by her face and was studying every bit of it when the corner of her mouth twitched for one millisecond, an instant that made it horrible, tense and shiny with bare teeth. Something different from the demeanor she was showing me.

“There is no charge for waiting,” she said and grinned. Then she told me she was an odori-ko, a dancer. I guessed it was an entry position.

“Only dancing?” I asked.

“Yes, I only dance.” Her mother was some kind of supervisor, Keiko explained, in charge of a group of girls, their hair, makeup, kimonos, as well as finding them time for classes and practice. Nevermind keeping the rooms clean and ready with the help of the cleaning staff.

Suddenly I realized that this room didn’t belong to an old man looking for someone to spend the night with, but to Keiko and her alone. Her presence was stronger, unrelenting. I was at her mercy. I sat there watching her move as if each of her actions followed a choreography practiced for years. She undid her intricate obi, a light green belt tied around her waist, revealing a simple under-belt made of a long piece of fabric. She looked at me to be sure I was still there, like a hunter looks to their prey to check it doesn’t have an escape route.

“What do you want to do then?” she asked.

“I would like to sit here a while longer for the time being.” She nodded. “I like the scenery,” I said and relaxed for the first time since I arrived. She poured more nihonshu into my cup and poured one out for herself. I closed my eyes. I got lost there, in the cozy sensation generated by her presence, making me feel as if I was in the right place, at the right time. Keiko whispered a song I had never heard before as she stood up and got back to the routine of working the room.

“Is it your first time here?” she asked. I nodded as I drank. “At least you came with a friend who pays your share.”

Moments as small performances. Her hip would twist to the side here and there, bending down lower than necessary, tracing a circle with the arm completely extended just put it down back again. It looked so natural I didn’t think about how it could seem ritualistic.

“Actually, we just met, right in front of the gate. He stuck to me speaking that weird Japanese and laughing all the time.”

“Your Japanese is a bit strange as well.” I wondered if she was like me, out of place and out of time. But that didn’t make any sense. She was genuine in everything she did, it all screamed out loud that she belonged.

“It’s a matter of who listens to it,” was the best answer I could come up with.

Although she was probably a decade younger than me, she talked like a mother, it was something in the words and gestures she chose, how they got her the exact responses she wanted to elicit.

I looked around in search of hints as to who Keiko was, beyond the things she said. I had no evidence that this room and her were linked in any way, I just wanted to assume that we were in a place of some significance for her. I saw a shamisen and a floral arrangement with withered Japanese irises. A calendar opened to the 31st of August 1923 hung on the wall. The NHK documentary came to me for a moment but the memory was interrupted by her question.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty,” I said. “And you?”

“Nineteen.” She asked more questions, some I answered, some I dodged. Between question and answer, images of the disaster. Between voices and silence, death came to mind.

“What do you do in your free time?” I asked. I imagined she would say things typical for a character in a Kawabata novel.

“I don’t have much free time, but usually I just help the girls. There is always something to clean, someone who needs her hair done or help with make-up.” Pause. “If there is any time left, I practice my dancing,” she added. Keiko poured two more cups. There was more realism in her than in Kawabata, something mundane and possible, something equally frightening.

“Where is this nihonshu from?” I asked.

“I never know where it comes from,” she confessed. “I only know if it’s tasty or not. This one is.” She undid her hair again as she said that. I looked and could see only sweetness in her face as if she didn’t want to show anything but that. Only that genuine expression of naked innocence. She took a piece of purple paper from a drawer on the table. She sang the same song again. She started folding the paper in different directions until it became a frog. Keiko pushed on the back and the folds made it jump towards me.

“Very cute,” I said. She wrapped it with her hands and wrote my name with a pencil on the frog’s stomach.

“Did I write it correctly?” she asked.

“Perfect,” I said. She took a pin from between the creases of her clothes and pierced the frog’s back. “That’s going to hurt.” She pushed the pin into the wall, with the frog still attached. An evil kind of pleasure. I felt it in my gut.

“I don’t know if it hurts. But you are going to have to come visit me again if you want to set it free.”

Looking into her eyes I discovered a brown shadow decorating that jet black. Ai didn’t show herself to me that way anymore, she didn’t want me in that way. Something in the courage Ai had shown me when we first met was gone. She wanted me in another way, smiling when I talked, taking her clothes off and enjoying the sex when I suggested it.

“Have you ever taken a bath in an ofuro?” Keiko asked. I had done the modern versions of it. Here there was a simple gas installation - no exhaust fan and no digital panel to choose the temperature. But the idea was the same.

“Of course,” I said. Keiko signaled for me to follow her through the sliding door and across the hallway. She turned on a light.

Once inside, I started taking my clothes off and piling them up. Naked, I sat on a stool. With a wooden ladle, I poured warm water on my shoulders and let it fall over my body. I tried to imagine the water like a powerful stream taking those images of death away, drowning that sharp pain I felt in my gut, the mischievous smile, all of it. I took some water with my hands and splashed it on my face. The sound of the door closing made me turn around and find Keiko naked. Her skin seemed hand-painted. There was no shame on her face. She pushed the buckets behind me, and picked up the bar of soap. Her hands dragged the soap along my back, leaving a thin layer of foam . Warm fingers lathered under my armpits, arms and shoulders. Her breasts were drawing shapes on my back. Nothing else but her in the world. I took her by the hand and moved gently so she would be standing in front of me. I kissed her stomach. I wanted to say something but whatever I thought would have ruined the moment.

She sat down on my lap, chest against chest. She combed my hair back and we looked into each other’s eyes. I saw only a curiosity for what would come out of this in hers. She kissed me on the lips. Sitting there for a while, on that stool, we made soap bubbles. Standing, she slowly poured water over my skin and left the room.

I dried myself so slowly it seemed dramatic. There was a kind of fear in the back of my head, a feeling caused by what I might find once I went back into the tatami room. But I got dressed and came out. Keiko was sleeping on the tatami, curled up, one leg with the knee up, the other one stretched, her head resting on her arm. She was already dead, I knew. She was a silhouette among hundreds in the documentary. I stopped to look at her one more time and saw her as something untranslatable. Then I went down the stairs trying not to make a sound. I didn’t feel like a stranger in that place anymore, for I knew Keiko. I got back into the night.

I whispered tadaima as I arrived home. I got naked and put my dirty clothes in the laundry hamper. I took a shower. Ai was asleep. I laid next to her and turned on the TV.